


Crescents

by helsinkibaby



Category: Press Gang
Genre: Angst, Post Series, Realisation of feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-07-27
Updated: 2004-07-27
Packaged: 2020-07-28 05:40:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20058934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/helsinkibaby/pseuds/helsinkibaby
Summary: Kenny on the flight home from Australia





	Crescents

“Sir? Are you all right?”

“Sorry?” Kenny looked up in some surprise at the air hostess, who, he realised, was looking at him with an expression of some concern, as if he was posing imminent danger to himself and the rest of the passengers.

Which he evidently was, if her next words were anything to go by. “You look tense,” she commented. “Nervous flier?”

Kenny looked down at his hands, noting his chalk white knuckles, and when he unclenched his fists, he could see the crescent impressions left by his fingernails. “Something like that,” he lied through his teeth, and the air hostess smiled, mollified somewhat.

“If you need anything,” she told him, “Just press the button.”

He nodded as she left, probably glad to make her escape from a seemingly lunatic flier, and Kenny forced himself to take some deep breaths, to relax.

It was no good of course. He had a feeling he wasn’t going to relax until the plane touched down in England, until he was back home in Norbridge.

Until he saw Lynda again.

He hadn’t been relaxed in days, not since he was woken up by a phone call in the middle of the night. Alex, cross-faced and sleep-wrinkled, had appeared at his bedroom door, telling him that it was his mother, and Kenny’s first words had been something about her getting the time difference wrong, and who did she think she was, Lynda?

The name had made his mother sob, and that was Kenny’s first clue that the world had fallen off its axis when he was on the other side of it.

The words that followed made no sense; the Junior Gazette newsroom destroyed in a fire, Lynda dead.

How could Lynda be dead? Lynda Day, editor extraordinaire, Vampira, Attila the Skirt, all the other sobriquets that had been bestowed on her ran through his head, and he knew, without knowing how, that he’d never expected this day would come, that he’d always thought that Lynda would be the one person that Death himself would fear.

How could Lynda be dead?

It made no sense to him, and it hadn’t become any clearer the more Jack Daniel’s he drank, the more he tried to talk through his feelings to his two semi-comatose room-mates, who were staying up with him because they were very afraid that their hitherto sober, serious and sensible flatmate would do something stupid in his grief.

Kenny would have been insulted, but truth be told, he wouldn’t have put it past him either.

The world only got more screwed-up when the phone rang again, and once more it was his mother. He’d thought she was calling to say they’d found Lynda’s body, that they’d made the arrangements, but not so.

Instead, she was calling to say that, by some miracle that no-one could explain, Lynda was alive.

His room-mates hadn’t believed him; they’d insisted on calling his mother back, just in case grief and Jack Daniel’s was doing a number on his hearing. But when they’d heard the truth, when he’d successfully sobered up, they had a couple of home truths for him.

“Mate, you’re in love with this girl… why are you here, when you could be there, doing something about it?”

He wanted to ask them what the hell gave them that impression, much less the one that anything could be done about it, because after all, hadn’t he told them about the saga of Spike and Lynda, weren’t they following it just as he was, second-hand via letters and phone calls from family and friends?

He wanted to tell them that they were wrong, but he knew they weren’t.

Which was why, twelve months after making the journey to Australia to find himself, find out who he was when he wasn’t Lynda Day’s Jiminy Cricket, he found himself on a plane, still nursing the remnants of the hangover of the millennium, on his way back home to see her, to convince himself that she really was still alive, all in one piece.

He didn’t know what he was going to do when he saw her, didn’t know if he was going to tell her what he’d found out about himself.

All he knew was that he had to see her.

Taking a few more deep breaths, he tried to calm the butterflies in his stomach, but the longer the flight went on, the deeper the impressions in his palms became, and he was powerless to do a thing about it.


End file.
